The Daily
A note a day on APIs and the realities of shipping web applications. Stuff I've actually learned across 25 years of doing the work.
nginx geo module: GeoIP routing and rate limiting for free
You don't need a paid WAF or middleware to block or throttle traffic by country. nginx's geo module does it before your app even wakes up.
The best middleware is the middleware that never runs your application code. I've been using nginx's built-in module for years to do cheap, fast, zero-dependency GeoIP-based routing and rate limiting, and I keep meeting developers who don't know it exists — or who are paying for a WAF to do something nginx handles…
Read the daily →ProxySQL vs. Laravel's Connection Pool: When the Proxy Earns Its Keep
Running MariaDB on a single VM? Here's when adding ProxySQL between Laravel and your database actually pays off — and when it just adds another thing to break.
ProxySQL is one of those tools that looks like overkill until the night your MariaDB server starts rejecting connections at 2am because you've got 400 open sockets and is 151. I've been there. But I've also added ProxySQL to setups where it genuinely made things worse — slower deploys, one more daemon to babysit, and…
Read the daily →S3 Lifecycle Policies Won't Break Your URLs (If You're Careful)
Tiering old user uploads to Glacier sounds free — until your app tries to serve a file and gets a 403. Here's how I do it without breaking anything.
I've been burned by this twice. S3 lifecycle policies look like free money — move old objects to cheaper storage, save 70% on storage costs, done. The problem is your app doesn't know the file moved, and neither does the user's browser when it follows a pre-signed URL to something that's now archived. Here's how I…
Read the daily →Roll Your Own Feature Flags vs. LaunchDarkly: The 12-Month Reckoning
I've built the DIY feature flag store twice. Here's the honest ops cost after 12 months that nobody talks about when they say 'it's just a database table'.
The first time I built a feature flag system from scratch, I was proud of it. Took maybe a day and a half. Fit neatly in one migration and a service class. The second time I built one, I knew better — and I still did it anyway, for a client who didn't want to pay $300/month for LaunchDarkly. Twelve months later I had…
Read the daily →Doppler vs. .env Files: What 'Simple' Actually Costs You
I ran .env files on single-server stacks for years. Doppler didn't sell me on features — it sold me on the operational debt I'd quietly been carrying.
I ran .env files on single-server stacks for a long time and told myself it was fine because the server was managed, the team was small, and a secrets manager felt like enterprise overhead for problems I didn't have. Then a client asked me to produce an audit trail of everyone who'd accessed their Stripe secret key…
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